Case for dynamic deployment in a grid-based distributed query processor
Future Generation Computer Systems
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A primary benefit of Web Services is that they provide a uniformimplementation-independent mechanism for accessing distributedservices. Building and deploying such services do not benefit fromthe same advantages, however. Different Web Services containersare implemented in different programming languages, with differentconstraints and requirements placed on the programmer. Moreover,client side programmers must use the Web Service interface specifiedby the service developer. Therefore, the kinds of applications and uses for a Web Service are unnecessarily restrictive, constrained bythe granularity of access defined by the interface and by thecharacteristics of the service functions. This paper describes anapproach that addresses both of these drawbacks by enabling Web Service containers with the ability to accept new mobile code on the fly,and to run it within the containers, providing direct local access to the containers' other services. The code can be specified in a small simplelanguage (a subset of C), and translated and passed to the container ina common XML-based intermediate language called X#. This approach effectively removes the dependence on any single implementationenvironment. Our prototype implementation for two different containers demonstrates the feasibility of the approach, which represents a firststep toward write-once deployanywhere Web Services.